SUB12

SUB12

In its third year, SUB12 is a major annual three-month exhibition program presenting newly commissioned work by twelve leading contemporary Australian artists. Previous curators of SUB12 are Tania Blackwell (2009) and Kate Daw (2010) and SUB12 has included the work of artists such as Bindi Cole, Julie Shiels and Brendan Lee. 2012 curator Jessica Bridgfoot has invited a group of Australia’s most exciting contemporary practitioners working across sculpture, painting, video, installation. Each artist has been ‘handed over’ a space within the industrial network of The Substation’s Gallery for a month of the program. Expect a radically diverse program of exhibitions and site-responsive interventions in one of Melbourne’s most interesting new art spaces. Read on…

Month One
June/July: June 28 – July 22
Mark Titmarsh, Ry Haskings, Santina Amato, Trevelyan Clay
In the first month of the program New York based Australian artist Santina Amato presents Cigarettes and Bees Knees, a video installation created specifically for the three leveled gallery space at The Substation. Amato’s haunting installation explores what it means to be feminine within contemporary society presenting a surrealist walk around the mind of the modern woman. Childhood is represented in upper level, the futures lies within the basement, and our current presence on ground floor. With a series of silhouettes and uncanny projections Cigarettes and Bees Knees creates a game for the viewer, a ‘Murder In The Dark’ scenario with clues are sprawled throughout the installation.

Month Two
July/August: July 26  - August 19
Sanné Mestrom, Steven Rendall, Rebecca Agnew, Juan Ford
Steven Rendall presents his ‘Television’ project where the artist pre-invites audience members to submit random images to be translated by Rendall onto a large painting. Mocking up an image of a television showroom as the framework for his composition, Rendall then goes about filling the screens with a disparate array of images. The painting is monumental in scale (3m x 5m) and acts as an extension of the gallery wall of The Substation angled out from the wall as un-stretched canvas on ply much like a drive-in movie screen. Building on Rendall’s interest in making visible the relation between source materials and the artist’s painting processes and by using the archaic technique of painting for the final outcome, ‘Television’ also brings into play ideas of authorship in the age of new technologies.

In contrast sculptor Sanné Mestrom presents a quiet contemplative installation in the form of a bronze architectural intervention. Casting the time-worn cracks in the concrete floor of an old utility room (now a gallery space) Mestrom’s work fills the cracks and crumbles of time with precious golden renderings. There is a viscerality to the work, the glinting sinewy fracture lines of bronze evocative of the fillings in ones teeth, however the use the neo classical medium of bronze seems more likely an act to rupture the present and monumentalize the past. As with Mestrom’s previous forays in social sculpture, the floor of the Substation is the reclaimed material, the materiality of the bronze a nod to high modernism.

Month Three
August/September: August 23 – September 16
Steven Asquith, Simon Pericich, Sanja Pahoki, Masato Takasaka
Engaging with both traditional notions of mark making and contemporary abstraction. Steven Asquith presents a punky monumental paste up on the gallery walls. Typically using spray chalkboard enamel, paint markers and enamel paint on board, he interweaves modern materials with primitive symbolism. Covering over 12 square metrs of wall space with an array of nonsensical symbols interlacing lines, dots and seemingly nonsensical patterning, Asquith creates a new abstract visual language to express contemporary experiences of hybrid visual cultures

Information

SUB12 is presented annually in partnership with Hobson’s Bay City Council who established the project in 2009 as a major initiative to present contemporary art in Melbourne’s West.

2012 Curator, Jessica Bridgfoot, Visual Arts Program Manager, The Substation

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition

Contact:  Erin Voth, Marketing and Communications Coordinator
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , (03) 9391 1110
Dates: June 28  September 16, 2012
Location: The Substation, 1 Market Street, Newport, www.thesubstation.org.au
Gallery Hours: Thursday - Sunday 11.00am-5.00pm


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